What we’re reading.

Some of the books that KFL staff members are reading at the moment (descriptions from the publishers will follow each title):

One librarian loved Timothy McCall’s Yoga as Medicine so much that she ordered a copy for herself:

The definitive book of yoga therapy, this groundbreaking work comes to you from the medical editor of the country’s premier yoga magazine, who is both a practicing yogi and a Western-trained physician.

Beginning with an overview of the history and science of yoga, Dr. McCall describes the many different techniques in the yoga tool kit; explains what yoga does and who can benefit from it (virtually everyone!); and provides lavishly illustrated and minutely detailed instructions on starting a yoga practice geared to your fitness level and your health status. Yoga as Medicine offers a wealth of practical information, including how to:

•Utilize yogic tools, including postures, breathing techniques, and meditation, for both prevention and healing of illness

•Master the art of becoming more in tune with your body

•Communicate more effectively with your doctor

•Adopt therapeutic yoga practices as either an alternative or a complement to surgery and to expensive, sometimes dangerous medications

•Practice safely

Find an instructor and a style of yoga that are right for you. With twenty chapters devoted to the work of individual master teachers, including such well-known figures as Patricia Walden, John Friend, and Rodney Yee, Yoga as Medicine shows how these experts have applied the wisdom of this ancient holistic practice to twenty different conditions, ranging from arthritis to chronic fatigue, depression, heart disease, HIV/AIDS, infertility, insomnia, multiple sclerosis, and obesity. Defining yoga as “a systematic technology to improve the body, understand the mind, and free the spirit,“ Dr. McCall shows the way to a path that can truly alter your life.

An indispensable guide for the millions who now practice yoga or would like to begin, as well as for yoga teachers, body workers, doctors, nurses, and other health professionals.

Another co-worker just read — and loved — A Match for Mary Bennet, by Eucharista Ward. She was feeling a bit gun-shy about Austen sequels due to her HUGE problems with Colleen McCullough’s The Independence of Mary Bennet, but she’s really glad that she did:

Written by a Franciscan nun, this is a sympathetic tale of the middle Bennet sister from Pride and Prejudice. Pious Mary Bennet tries to do her duty in the world as she thinks God envisions it.

Initially believing (mistakenly) that her sister Elizabeth married well only in order to provide for her sisters, Mary is happy to be relieved of the obligation to marry at all so that she can continue her faithful works.

But she begins to have second thoughts after further studying marriage through her sisters’ experiences as well as spending time with two young men. One is a splendid young buck whose determined courtship must have ulterior motives; the other is a kindly, serious young clergyman whose friendship Mary values more and more. One day she realizes that God very much made man and woman to be together…but which is the man for her?

Yet another is reading No Angel, the first book in Penny Vincenzi’s Lytton Family trilogy — and she’s already talking about reading the next one:

This is the first volume of a trilogy about Lyttons, a great publishing house and the family that own it. The three books are set in the period before, during and after the Second World War and they cover the lives of three generations of this powerful and passionate family.

Book one will introduce Oliver Lytton, the head of the firm and indeed of the family and his beautiful wife, Lady Celia. They have three children: Giles, the ambitious heir to Lyttons who is engaged to the perfect woman for a man with an important future; Elspeth, who is spoilt, difficult and beautiful and already in a disastrous marriage to a rich philandering layabout; and Kit who, though an afterthought, is, at eleven years of age, the golden boy and the apple of his parents’ eye.

The story is about divided loyalties, both personal and professional, reaching crisis point when these two domains collide. It is about secrets, lies and the dangers of telling the truth. It is about ruthlessness, ambition and power. But above all, it is about a powerful family and the politics that are unavoidable.

Our Jim Butcher fan is continuing on through the Codex series and has just started the third book, Cursor’s Fury (there’s an excerpt available at the author’s website):

Since the Second Battle of Calderon, only the courage, determination and sacrifice of loyal subjects of the realm of Alera have prevented the unthinkable—a civil war that could leave Alera in ruins, devastated and vulnerable to its enemies. Loyal Alerans have given their blood and lives to preserve the realm.

It was not enough. Though the insurrection of the High Lords against the First Lord, Gaius Sextus, has been delayed for several years, it has only been the calm before the storm.

Civil war shatters the realm.

Now, the power-hungry High Lord of Kalare has launched a merciless, devastating rebellion against Gaius. Caught off guard by the sheer power of Kalare’s attack, Gaius Primus and the loyal forces of Alera must fight for the survival of the realm, beside the most dangerous of allies—the equally rebellious and power-hungry High Lord and Lady of Aquitaine.

Trapped in the besieged city of Ceres, Isana of Calderon survives the attack of Kalare’s assassins, and must fight to save the life of the wounded slave, Fade, poisoned while defending Isana from her attackers. The secrets of her past loom large in deed and memory, as she at last confronts the dark truths of her own past.

Countess Amara, Cursor to the First Lord, must carry out a desperate rescue operation, freeing hostages taken by Kalare and held against the military neutrality of loyal High Lords. The survival of the realm could hinge on the success of her mission: but is her ally, Lady Aquitaine, sincere in her efforts to assist—or will she betray the young Cursor and the First Lord she serves?

Sent away from the theater of the civil war by a protective First Lord, young Tavi of Calderon joins the newly formed First Aleran Legion as its juniormost officer under an assumed name as a spy for the First Lord—but when civil war erupts, Tavi’s captain learns that Kalare has done the unthinkable; allied himself to the Canim, a merciless, terrifying enemy of the realm, who have arrived in numbers more vast than any in history. When treachery from within its ranks destroys the command structure of the First Aleran, the young Cursor finds himself in command. The First Aleran is friable, undertrained, poorly equipped; and it is the only force standing between the Canim horde and the heart of war-torn Alera.

Haven Moore can’t control her visions of a past with a boy called Ethan and a life in New York that ended in fiery tragedy. In our present, she designs beautiful dresses for her classmates with her best friend Beau. Dressmaking keeps her sane, since she lives with her widowed and heartbroken mother in her tyrannical grandmother’s house in Snope City, a tiny town in Tennessee. Then an impossible group of coincidences conspire to force her to flee to New York, to discover who she is, and who she was.

In New York, Haven meets Iain Morrow and is swept into an epic love affair that feels both deeply fated and terribly dangerous. Iain is suspected of murdering a rock star and Haven wonders, could he have murdered her in a past life? She visits the Ouroboros Society and discovers a murky world of reincarnation that stretches across millennia. Haven must discover the secrets hidden in her past lives, and loves, before all is lost and the cycle begins again.

As always, if you would like to place a hold, please call the library at 985-2173 or visit our website.